Searle’s father was a business executive and his mother a physician. After moving several times, the family finally settled in Wisconsin. As a 19-year-old junior at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study at the University of Oxford. After receiving a doctorate in philosophy in 1959, he left Oxford to join the faculty of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was eventually appointed Mills Professor of Philosophy and later Slusser Professor of Philosophy.

Philosophy of language

Speech acts

Searle’s early work in the philosophy of language was an outgrowth of his study at Oxford under the ordinary-language philosopher J.L. Austin. In his 1955 William James Lectures at Harvard University, published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin criticized the tendency of analytic philosophers, especially adherents of the school of logical positivism, for supposing that there is only one basic kind of language use: that of making descriptive utterances (in speech or in writing) that are either true or false depending on how the world is. Focusing as they did on scientific discourse, the logical positivists went so far as to claim that an utterance is meaningful only if it is a tautology or such that it can be confirmed or disconfirmed (in principle) through experience; all other utterances are literally nonsense (seeverifiability principle). Austin pointed out that descriptive utterances (which he called “constatives”) hardly exhaust the range of meaningful uses of language. They are only one of many kinds of performative utterance, or speech act (Austin called them “illocutionary acts”), which consist of social acts performed by means of linguistic utterances in appropriate circumstances. Other examples are orders, requests, promises, greetings, resignations, warnings, and dozens more. For most speech acts, the utterance through which the act is performed—e.g., “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth”—is neither true nor false, though the performance may be infelicitous in various ways, as when a person who is not authorized to name the ship cracks a champagne bottle against the bow and utters “I name this ship the Generalissimo Stalin.”

In his first major work, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), Searle treated speech acts much more systematically than Austin had. He proposed that each kind of speech act can be defined in terms of a set of rules that identify the conditions that are individually necessary and collectively sufficient for “sincerely and non-defectively” performing an act of that kind. Among the rules for promising, for example, are that the speaker (S) predicate a future act (A) of himself, that S intend to carry out A, that the hearer (H) prefer that S carry out A, that it not be obvious to both S and H that S would carry out A in the normal course of events, and that S intend to place himself under an obligation to carry out A.

At a more general level, Searle identified three basic dimensions with respect to which different kinds of speech vary from one another: the illocutionary point of the act, insofar as it is an act of a certain type; what he called the act’s “direction of fit”; and the psychological state expressed by the act. For example, the illocutionary point of a statement, insofar as it is a statement, is to present the world as being a certain way, and the illocutionary point of an order, insofar as it is an order, is to get the hearer to do something.

A speech act’s direction of fit characterizes the way in which acts of that type are related to the world. A statement has a “word-to-world” fit because it constitutes an attempt by the speaker to make his words “match” the world in a certain sense. In contrast, a promise has a world-to-word fit because it constitutes an undertaking on the part of the speaker to make the world match his words. (Searle also recognized a “null” direction of fit for speech acts, such as greetings and thanks, that match neither words to the world nor the world to words.)

Finally, the expressed psychological state of a speech act is the belief, desire, intention, or other mental state that a speaker necessarily expresses by performing an act of that type. The statement “It is raining” expresses the speaker’s belief that it is raining; the order “Get me some raisins” expresses the speaker’s desire that the hearer get him some raisins; and the promise “I’ll be there” expresses the speaker’s intention to be there. The expressed psychological state of a speech act is distinct from its propositional content; in the examples above, the propositional contents of the acts are, respectively, that it is raining, that the hearer gets the speaker some raisins, and that the speaker will be there.

Using these dimensions, Searle developed an elaborate speech act taxonomy, consisting at its highest level of five categories: (1) assertives (e.g., statements, descriptions, and predictions), (2) directives (e.g., orders, requests, and direction giving), (3) commissives (e.g., promises, oaths, and bets), (4) expressives (e.g., greetings, congratulations, and thanks), and (5) declarations (e.g., excommunications, hirings, and declarations of war). Searle considers his taxonomy to be superior to Austin’s, in part because Austin’s was not based on a definite set of basic dimensions and so resulted in inconsistent and overlapping classifications of speech acts.

Searle also introduced the notion of an indirect speech act, in which the speaker performs one kind of speech act by means of performing another. An example is the statement “You are standing on my foot,” used as a means of requesting or demanding that the hearer get off one’s foot.

According to Searle, speech acts do not function in isolation. They are embedded within a “Network” of unarticulated beliefs and other mental states and within a “Background” of capacities, all of which must exist if the illocutionary point of the act is to be served. For example, the promise “I’ll buy you dinner” presupposes that the speaker understands what dinner is, what money is, and what restaurants are and that he knows how to conduct himself in a restaurant and how to eat and drink.

Speech act theory is important in the philosophy of language not only for having demonstrated the wide range of meaningful uses of language but also for yielding insight into fundamental issues such as the distinction between speaker meaning and conventional meaning, the nature of reference and predication, the division between semantic and pragmatic (use-generated) aspects of communicated meaning, and the scope of linguistic knowledge.

Philosophy of mind

In large part, Searle was driven to the study of mind by his study of language. As indicated above, his analysis of speech acts always involved reference to mental concepts. Since mental states are essentially involved in issuing speech acts, Searle realized that his analysis of language could not be complete unless it included a clear understanding of those states.

Intentionality and consciousness

An important feature of the majority of mental states is that they have an “intentional” structure: they are intrinsically about, or directed toward, something. (Intentionality in this sense is distinct from the ordinary quality of being intended, as when one intends to do something.) Thus, believing is necessarily believing that something is the case; desiring is necessarily desiring something; intending is necessarily intending to do something. Not all mental states are intentional, however: pain, for example, is not, and neither are many states of anxiety, elation, and depression.

Speech acts are intentional in a derivative sense, insofar as they are expressive of intrinsically intentional mental states, including expressed psychological states and propositional contents. According to Searle, the derived intentionality of language accounts for the apparently mysterious capacity of words, phrases, and sentences to refer not only to things in the world but also to things that are purely imaginary or fictional.

Although not all mental states are intentional, all of them, in Searle’s view, are conscious, or at least capable in principle of being conscious. Indeed, Searle maintains that the notion of an unconscious mental state is incoherent. He argues that, because consciousness is an intrinsically biological phenomenon, it is impossible in principle to build a computer (or any other nonbiological machine) that is conscious. This thesis runs counter to much contemporary cognitive science and specifically contradicts the central claim of “strong” artificial intelligence (AI): that consciousness, thought, or intelligence can be realized artificially in machines that exactly mimic the computational processes presumably underlying human mental states.

The Chinese room argument

In a now classic paper published in 1980, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Searle developed a provocative argument to show that artificial intelligence is indeed artificial. Imagine that a person who knows nothing of the Chinese language is sitting alone in a room. In that room are several boxes containing cards on which Chinese characters of varying complexity are printed, as well as a manual that matches strings of Chinese characters with strings that constitute appropriate responses. On one side of the room is a slot through which speakers of Chinese may insert questions or other messages in Chinese, and on the other is a slot through which the person in the room may issue replies. The person in the room, using the manual, acts as a kind of computer program, transforming one string of symbols introduced as “input” into another string of symbols issued as “output.” Searle claims that even if the person in the room is a good processor of messages, so that his responses always make perfect sense to Chinese speakers, he still does not understand the meanings of the characters he is manipulating. Thus, contrary to strong AI, real understanding cannot be a matter of mere symbol manipulation. Like the person in the room, computers simulate intelligence but do not exhibit it.

Learn about John Searle’s Chinese room argument, a critique of the Turing test.

The Chinese room argument has generated an enormous critical literature. According to the “systems response,” the occupant of the room is analogous not to a computer but only to a computer’s central processing unit (CPU). He does not understand Chinese because he is only one part of the computer that responds appropriately to Chinese messages. What does understand Chinese is the system as a whole, including the manual, any instructions for using it, and any intermediate means of symbol manipulation. Searle’s reply is that the other parts of the system can be dispensed with. Suppose the person in the room simply memorizes the characters, the manual, and the instructions so that he can respond to Chinese messages entirely on his own. He still would not know what the Chinese characters mean.

Another objection claims that robots consisting of computers and sensors and having the ability to move about and manipulate things in their environment would be capable of learning Chinese in much the same way that human children acquire their first languages. Searle rejects this criticism as well, claiming that the “sensory” input the computer receives would also consist of symbols, which a person or a machine could manipulate appropriately without any understanding of their meaning.

Mind and body

Searle’s view that mental states are inherently biological implies that the perennialmind-body problem—the problem of explaining how it is possible for minds and bodies to interact—is fundamentally misconceived. Minds and bodies are not radically different kinds of substance, as the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes maintained, and minds certainly do not belong to any realm that is separate from the physical world. This is not to say that mental states are “reducible” to physical states, so that all talk of the mental can be eliminated in favour of talk of the physical. Rather, they are intrinsic features of certain very complex kinds of biological system. Because mental states are biological, they can cause and be caused by physical changes in human bodies. Moreover, reference to them is essential to any adequate explanation of human behaviour.

Philosophy of social institutions

Searle’s interest in social institutions, like his interest in the mind, was also an outgrowth of his study of language. Speech acts, after all, are linguistic entities embedded in social settings. Searle was thus naturally drawn to questions concerning the constitution and creation of social institutions.

A key notion in Searle’s account of social institutions is that of a collective intention, such as the intention expressed by “Let’s push the log at the count of three.” Collective intentions, or “we-intentions,” entail the existence of individual intentions, or “I-intentions,” because a person cannot intend that he and others do something without also intending that he do his part (and because there is no distinct entity, over and above the individual, that could be said to be the bearer of a collective intention). Although we-intentions are held only by individuals, they are not reducible to I-intentions; in other words, a we-intention is not merely the sum of a certain number of I-intentions. This fact is evident, according to Searle, in any example of cooperative behaviour, such as a football (soccer) game or an orchestral performance. The we-intention to run a set piece in football is not equivalent to the sum of I-intentions to run, kick, or head; and the we-intention to perform a symphony is not equivalent to the sum of I-intentions to play a certain sequence of notes on a certain instrument.

According to Searle, objective social reality is literally created by means of we-intentions. The general form of such intentions is “X counts as Y in context C” or “X becomes Y in context C.” By adopting a we-intention that X counts as or becomes Y in C, individuals make it an objective fact that X counts as or becomes Y in C. A familiar example is the institution of money, which is created by the we-intention to treat certain pieces of paper or metal, issued by the appropriate governmental authority, as money.

An important feature of we-intentions in their role as creators of social institutions is that they can be iterated: given a we-intention of the form “X counts as Y in C,” the “Y” in the intention may become the “X” in a higher-level intention. For example, a certain utterance (X) counts as an English sentence (Y) in the context of an intention (by an English speaker) to utter an English sentence (C); an English sentence (X) counts as a promise (Y) in the context of an intention by the speaker that he do what he says he will do (C); the making of a promise (X) counts as getting married (Y) in the context of a marriage ceremony (C); and so on. According to Searle, the possibility of this kind of iteration helps to explain how complex social institutions are created out of simpler ones. Other examples of social institutions created by we-intentions are employment, ownership of private property, games, universities, political parties, governments, and, most importantly for Searle, language.

Searle has written scores of journal articles and several books. In addition to Speech Acts, the latter include: Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (1979), Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), The Construction of Social Reality (1995), Rationality in Action (2001), and Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010).